​Brief and objectives:

School Trends is a growing business supplying quality school uniforms to 5,000 schools across the country.

With a well-established base of school customers, the team at School Trends wanted to raise awareness of the brand amongst parents and highlight themselves as the market leader amongst this important B2C audience.

Our key objectives were to:

• Raise awareness of the School Trends brand amongst parents
  
• Increase exposure of the company using social media
  

Strategy and tactics:

We devised a social media strategy with the aim of raising awareness of the School Trends brand amongst parents. Using Twitter, we set up a competition for parents to win £150 worth of school uniform by tweeting a picture of their child on their first day at school.

To be in with a chance of winning, the post had to include the hashtag #firstdayselfie. Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn were also used to support the Twitter activity.

Our tactics consisted of:

• Launching the #firstdayselfie competition on Twitter, supporting it with other social channels – Pinterest, Google + and LinkedIn, and implementing over 10 days at the start of the new term
  
• Media relations activity announcing the competition across education journalists at regional papers
  
• Engaging with schools, children’s clubs and publications aimed at parents
  
• Managing competition mechanics, then measuring outcomes following the campaign

Implementation

In the run up to the campaign launch, the HR Media team drafted copy for the School Trends website, including clear terms and conditions. We also developed an activity plan spanning each of the social media platforms across the ten days the campaign was planned for.

The activity included targeted social posts to promote the competition – including key messages about the brand, infographics and images. The focus of the activity was on the School Trends twitter feed, but was very much supported by all other channels.

All content included a clear call to action and all images were tailored to engage with parents.

Kicking off at the end of August we ran the competition over ten days.

During this time we targeted strategic organisations, such as children’s after school clubs and parenting magazines, and encouraged them to engage with the competition.  We also called on schools to share the message with their followers – this was crucial for targeting large audiences of parents. This resulted in favourites and retweets from other accounts, spreading the word about the competition without any spend on promoted tweets.

To support the social channels, we used press releases to announce the competition through the traditional media.

Measurement and evaluation

The competition was a huge success.

• The number of engagements increased by eight per cent
  
• The number of impressions per tweet increased by 169 per cent
  
• There was an 11 per cent increase in School Trends followers
  
• The press release secured coverage in key target publications
  

We received lots of pictures with big first day smiles, and we picked a winner at random to receive £150 worth of top quality uniform from School Trends.

A*s all round!